The money quote: "Last month we had, uhhhh, about a, almost a $5000 month when that many jobs weren't created."

Yeah. I know. The Governor may need to write these lines on his hand next time.

Jim Geraghty over at NRO's Campaign Spotseems to think the bumbling Strickland may have been trying to spit something else out:

I presume the governor was trying to emphasize that the state actually created 4900 jobs in the previous month, but the unemployment rate actually increased because the number of people looking for work increased — i.e., people who were not part of the workforce got back in and started looking.

And yet, Ohio's labor pool is still 62,000 workers short of where it was one year ago.

But don't think Strickland's efforts to distribute rose-colored glasses to the electorate will work. As I've said many times here on 3BP, a Jobs Crisis is personal. It effects your family, your neighbor, and your community. Simply trying to convince voters everything is going well, as Strickland is clearly trying to do, won't work.

For four years now, Julie Bittner has rung up customers in this little store on the charming grassy square at the heart of Twinsburg in Summit County. And from her view by the front window, she has watched the fortunes of a ransacked autoworkers' mecca slowly drain away. Streets once teeming with people are now deserted. Some days, she says, not a soul comes through the door.

She's seen the headlines. The recession is ending. Unemployment is stabilizing. From Wall Street to Washington, the message comes: America, the worst is over. Let the spending begin. But in places like Twinsburg, where for so many the misery goes on unabated, people aren't buying the rhetoric. If brighter days are ahead, they say, they're still awaiting the dawn.

According to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted in early April, many Americans' impressions of the economy, and their own financial straits, haven't budged in a long time.

"Who are they trying to kid?" Bittner asked. "Are they trying to make you think it's better so you'll go out and spend?"

And what did Governor Strickland have to say way back on March 9th?

"The freefall has been stopped....[Ohio is] in the process of recovering."

Across the street from where Strickland goes to work every day at the Statehouse sits a statue of former Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes, a fellow son of southern Ohio who made enough sense to voters that they made him governor four times. You can look it up.

An inscription on one side of the statue's base quotes Rhodes as saying, "The greatest contribution a governor can make is to create jobs in the private sector."

If that's the prime measuring stick that voters use this November, there could be a different guy going to work across the street at the Statehouse next year.

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Third Base Politics is an Ohio-centric conservative blog that has been featured at Hot Air, National Review, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Michelle Malkin, and Ace of Spades, among others.